Canon Pixma MG7720 Wireless Inkjet All-In-One Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

Unless you’ve been watching the printer market awfully closely, you’ll find it difficult to trace the lineage of today’s review unit through the evolution of Canon’s photo printers. We’re looking at Canon’s current flagship model among consumer-grade, photo-ready all-in-ones (AIOs), the Pixma MG7720 Photo All-in-One Inkjet Printer. (Its list price is $199.99, but while writing this, we found it on sale at shop.usa.canon.com for $50 off, or $149.99.) Canon’s MG line emphasizes photo printing; its MX line of Pixmas is geared more toward balanced general printing and document handling.

An upgrade to the $149.99-list Pixma MG6820 we reviewed not long before it, this six-ink Pixma prints some of the brightest, most vibrant photos you’ll get from a consumer-grade photo printer. To get better output than this, you’ll have to turn to a professional-grade photo printer, such as Canon’s own $499.99-MSRP Pixma Pro-100 or Epson’s $799.99 SureColor P600—elaborate, large nine-ink printers, both.

Aside from printing better photos, the professional-grade models mentioned here and their numerous counterparts aren’t really designed for printing document pages consisting of text and graphics. Nor is it economically feasible to do much of that on them. It’s not that they’re not capable of printing all kinds of output; they surely are. But using them to do so is wasteful. It’s too expensive to use your nine-ink photo printer to print business reports or presentations.

In any case, back to the history of this particular AIO. Prior to the MG7000-series Pixma printers, Canon, in 2010, offered a higher-end six-ink Pixma, the Pixma MG8120, which not only was an excellent photo and document printer, but could also scan slides and negatives—a well-rounded photo-centric AIO. But Canon eventually ditched the somewhat expensive MG8000 series (which topped out, in their time, at $299.99) for a less-expensive six-ink MG7000 series (now cresting at $199.99).

If you shop around, you’ll inevitably find these printers for less. (That’s always been the case with these consumer Pixmas.) Unfortunately, the same does not apply to the ink. Unless you’re feeding the Pixma MG7720 third-party ink, this model’s per-page cost using genuine Canon ink relegates it, where documents are concerned, to being a low-volume printer.

It’s expensive to operate as a photo printer, too, simply by the nature of photo printing, as we’ll get into more later on. But if top-notch “keeper” photographs are what you’re after, you may find the outlay worth the price. Granted, HP’s Instant Ink allows certain of that company’s photo-ready Envy models to print images dirt-cheap. But those are four-ink, two-cartridge machines that, while they print decent-enough photos, are not equal to what the Pixma MG7720 gives you in vibrancy and color depth.

Our bottom line on this printer, its siblings, and its predecessors? If you’re looking for the least-expensive way to print the best-looking photos, the Pixma MG7720 is arguably it. Beyond it, you’re looking at a much costlier proposition to buy and operate one of those professional-grade photo printers we mentioned earlier. But as a general-purpose printer, the Pixma MG7720 is not as strong a choice. The output is unimpeachable, but it will be dear.

Design & Features

Like most printer families, the Pixma “MG” photo AIO line has evolved over the years. But this one has done so more slowly than most.

We saw, for example, some noticeable body-style changes between the Pixma MG7120 and the Pixma MG7520. But as you can see in the image below, the physical differences between last year’s MG7520 and 2015’s MG7720 flagship, if they exist at all, are negligible…

Our Pixma MG7720 test unit is the one on the right. If there are any differences between the two beyond the model name on the chassis, we don’t see them.

If you were to look at these two printers in your local office superstore’s aisles, though, you might see some color-scheme differences. The 2014 model let you choose among black, white, and burnt-orange colors; in the MG7720, the chassis choices are basic black, as well as red, white, and gold…

At 17.2 inches across, 14.6 inches from front to back, and just 5.9 inches high (and weighing 17.4 pounds), the Pixma MG7720’s measurements and weight are identical to those of its predecessor, suggesting that no new hardware was added. Most (or all) of the updates in this generation were software-based. Like its long list of predecessors, this low-slung Pixma fits easily under just about any hanging cabinet or shelf—it’s low and long rather than tall.

The reason that the Pixma MG7720 is so short, compared to many other AIOs, is its lack of a top-mounted automatic document feeder (ADF), used for scanning and copying multi-page documents. Here, you must feed the scanner one photo or document page at a time. If you’ve ever scanned a big stack of documents one by one on a platen, we’re confident that you will appreciate how much more efficient it is to have the AIO do that for you. As we’ve said many times, if you see much scanning of multi-page documents in your future, you’ll need an AIO with an ADF. This is not that AIO.

Like on last year’s model, the Pixma MG7720’s control panel is easy to use and well-organized, with some UI-centric smarts. When idle, for example, the control panel consists of only the power button and the Wi-Fi-connectivity LED. It’s not until you wake up the printer and put it to work that this panel comes to life…

This 3.5-inch LCD and the area surrounding it is context-sensitive in that, when you choose an option (such as, say, Copy), the panel configures itself for making copies, displaying only the options required to complete that task. Touching Cloud, on the other hand, lights up options for printing from and scanning to the various cloud services this AIO supports. (Those include Google Cloud Print, My Image Garden, and Cloud Link Printing, as well as several third-party cloud sites and services, including Evernote.)

Then, too, Canon provides several mobile connectivity options of its own, such as Access Print Mode (APM), which is Canon’s lingo for Wi-Fi Direct, a protocol that allows you to connect a mobile device straight to the printer without the devices being connected through a wireless LAN or router as an intermediary. The Pixma MG7720 also supports Canon’s version of Near-Field Communication (NFC), which the company calls Pixma Touch & Print. It allows you to print from your smartphone, tablet, or laptop by touching the device to a hotspot on the printer, shown here…

You can also use the control panel for walk-up, or PC-free, operations, such as making copies and scanning to the cloud or a network drive, as well as to a couple of kinds of memory cards (SD cards, Memory Sticks). Canon also relies on its Wireless PictBridge feature to send photos to the printer from a digital camera. (A big limitation of that: Only select Canon cameras support this protocol.) Unfortunately, you won’t find a port up here for USB thumb drives for direct-from-USB printing.

Like its Pixma MG7520 predecessor, but unlike its less-expensive siblings, this model can also print on “printable” (appropriately surfaced) recordable CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. You can design your disc labels with the bundled disc-labeling utility. When you’re ready, you drop the blank disc (we’re talking about the label side here being blank, not the recordable side) into the bundled caddy and insert it as shown in the image below, just beneath the control panel…

As we’ve pointed out a few times about this kind of printing, this really is an occasional-use, now-and-then solution for cataloging your personal or work-related data on properly labeled optical discs, not a mass-production one. The loading process will get old quickly if you need to print more than a few discs.